The Hamishsphere: The Hamptons

I staggered off the Los Angeles red eye and into the bucolic Bridgehampton farmhouse of the hospitable Bill Smith and Michael Morelli, its luxuriant rolling lawns shaded with ancient maples, its flower beds brilliant with purple blooms. What a glorious way to start the weekend. There is, however, no rest for the weary, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled to be thrown into the maelstrom of Hamptonian social engagements. The Southampton home of Kelly and Jay Sugarman simply beggars description, unfurling as it does in an acreage of pale-stone modernity for about two city blocks alongside a particularly ravishing stretch of dunes and beach. We were bidden to support New Yorkers for Children and heard an inspirational and moving first-person account of how this organization really can change lives. But dare I say the fun really started when one was directed to explore the endless stretches that Kelly herself has painstakingly conceived and decorated with reductive style? I don’t know that organic Brazilian furniture and a dazzling Basquiat are absolutely screaming recession chic, but the view through the swimming pool from an underground walkway (via two picture windows) to the ocean beyond had an indisputable Dr. No glamour, and the Sugarman abode has the most inviting screening room I have ever seen: stepped tiers carpeted in sinking chocolate wool and scattered with a contemporary take on a radassier, each square cushion upholstered in a different handwoven textile of unidentifiable ethnic provenance—Central America? Morocco? Turkey? Regardless, one would never want to leave. But, alas, we had to, as decorator Lee Mindel summoned guests to celebrate his birthday at the striking modernist manse he has created in woodland that laps the water’s edge on the North Fork of Long Island. Sliced into this faintly sinister fairy-tale landscape, Mindel’s house is filled with a suavely arranged treasury of mid-century furnishings by such greats as Prouvé, Perriand, Neimeyer, Corbusier, and Royère. Most impressive. Guests were asked to arrive no later than sunset (orange, magenta, mauve) for a concert by a mystery performer. This turned out, oh so happily, to be the remarkable Marilyn Maye (above) a chanteuse in the old-fashioned tradition—droll repartee, a belting, tireless voice, and every word articulated with impeccable clarity. Maye certainly knows how to deliver a song. At 81, the sprightly, twinkling, and indefatigable Maye—spotlit against a backdrop of trees, haloed in bugs, and at times competing with what sounded like a not-too-distant frat party—proved herself every inch the consummate performer, singing classics by Cole Porter, Betty Comden, and Lerner and Loewe (everything I love and some surprises, too; try the delectably sly “Country Boy”) for something like an hour and a half. Frankly, I could have listened all night. Lunch chez Annette Tapert and her husband, Joe Allen, the following day was an absolutely delicious family affair, and the gossip all a-sizzle. Back in the city it was Gay Pride day, and where else to celebrate but at Susanne Bartsch’s “I Do I Amsterdam” party at Club Greenhouse, dancing to Michael Jackson? The preternaturally ageless Bartsch was decked out in wedding finery of considerable invention and chic; she really is a phenomenon and a national (Swiss) treasure, isn’t she?